In a month of aerial tragedies, Joseph Benjamin Grammer would die, too. He would die, at the age of 36, on the 12th of September. A Wednesday. He would die in a dense and unaxed woodland far from his home in Boulder City. He would die in the refurbished Fairchild-Hiller 1100 helicopter he had just purchased that same day. He would die doing what he loved doing, which was to fly.
He was 32 years old when he began flying, says his family. He had grown to be an insatiable outdoorsman—fishing, scuba diving, snowmobiling, taking safaris in his Jeep—and so it was only natural that he would pick up flying and turn himself into a deft pilot who could navigate the skies with such mastery that in 2004, at the age of 33, he would become a flight instructor and open up his own pilot-training school the following year.
Which he did, in Boulder City. It was called Leading Edge Rotorcraft, and it was run out of a small portable at the east end of the Boulder City airport with about a dozen students under its wings and a few helicopters to its name, namely Robinson R22s and R44s.
Grammer planned at the beginning of September to retrieve another helicopter for his school—a refurbished Fairchild-Hiller 1100—from the Van Nevel Helicopters Academy in Century, Florida, which is where FH-1100s are manufactured. He brought with him one of his students, Jeffrey Daniel Le Gro, 24 years old and well on his way to obtaining his commercial pilot’s license.
A born adventurer and the grandson of a pilot, Le Gro had been just like his teacher in that he needed the outdoors: hunting, fishing, biking, scuba diving and, now that he had discovered the inimitable joy of the open skies, flying. His mother says that he had already obtained his private license and, with this cross-country trip to Florida and back under his belt, would have fulfilled the requirement of hours in the air to earn his commercial license. Le Gro, to the great misfortune of the many people who knew and loved the Eldorado High graduate, would die too in the helicopter crash on September 12.
According to locals it was a pleasant Wednesday, about 80 degrees and without rain in the Caddo Parish, a county in northwestern Louisiana covering 852 miles of, for the most part, wilderness. Deer, waterfowl, reptiles, the swampy Black Bayou Lake. And myriad, unaxed trees: arboretums, tupelos, bald cypresses, bottomland hardwoods and the tremendous pines and upland hardwoods that dwarf men and can swallow helicopters whole.
At 6:30 p.m., multiple 911 calls came into the Caddo Parish sheriff’s department reporting the unmistakable sound of a low aircraft and then the repercussion of a crash. One unique feature about helicopters is that they can ascend and descend vertically, but according to Tim LeBaron, an investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board, the FH-1100 in which Grammer and Le Gro were flying did not. It came straight through the trees.
Something unconfessable had occurred in the dying light of that 12th of September, a month in which the small plane of famous adventurer Steve Fossett went down without a trace somewhere in Northern Nevada and three pilots in Reno lost their lives during high-speed plane crashes, because, according to federal investigators, the FH-1100 still had enough fuel in it to have sparked a great fire upon its crash, and though there were radios in the cabin no calls of distress were sent out to air traffic control.
Patrol units from the sheriff’s department needed ATVs to make their way through the pathless woods in which the FH-1100 crashed, and by the time they found Grammer and Le Gro, both deceased, it was a little past 8:30 p.m.
One witness from the scene says the helicopter had been crushed like a soda can, its vertical fin smashed up against its cabin. Another says the helicopter wreaked its own damage on the trees, mangling and crippling the pines and hardwoods in its path.
Patrollers managed to salvage paperwork from the helicopter’s cabin, and it indicated that Grammer had just purchased the FH-1100 earlier that day, and was planning to make a pit stop on his way home to Leading Edge Rotorcraft in the small town of Paris, Texas, less than 150 miles from where the chopper went down. LeBaron says Grammer was not required to have a black box in the FH-1100.
The National Transportation Safety Board says they may take a year to conclude their investigation as to what happened. To see why the helicopter lost its lift. They say they will look into things like the pilot’s experience with the helicopter model, as well as the integrity of that refurbished FH-1100, both of which are uncertain right now.
In the eyes of those who knew Grammer, his family says, the helicopter might have lost its lift over the dense, myriad trees of northwestern Louisiana, but Grammer, remembered as an extrovert with a soaring spirit, did not. As one of his old friends put it during Grammer’s funeral, his wings merely extended to new heights.